A decision over whether Williamson County can remove an image of the Confederate flag from its official seal rests with a Chancery Court judge.
The Maj. Nathaniel Cheairs Camp 2138 Sons of Confederate Veterans filed suit against the county and the Tennessee Historical Commission in December seeking to keep the so-called Great Seal of Williamson County — with its image of a cannon draped by a Confederate flag — intact.
The lawsuit alleged that Williamson County and the Historical Commission followed an unlawful procedure when the county sought — and the Historical Commission granted — an official declaration that the seal is not a historic monument and, therefore, not subject to the state’s historic preservation law, which generally disfavors altering or removing monuments and markers of Tennessee’s history.
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Before seeking that declaration, the county had begun the process of petitioning the Historical Commission for permission to alter the seal, an admission that the county believed the seal was, in fact, subject to the state’s historic preservation law, according to legal arguments by the the Sons of Confederate Veterans.